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Das Kind war tot

We are our own devils; we drive ourselves out of our Edens.
— Goethe

Great art is never simple. Like myth and dreams it comprises puzzle boxes of resonance and interpretation. In “Der Erlkönig,” the listener is faced from the start with a choice between what might be called literal and realist accounts of its narrative. Does the story occur as described, a supernatural mystery? Or is the boy hallucinating from an illness that ultimately takes his life? Neither alternative entirely satisfies so the listener must concoct a hybrid view or veer unsurely between options. This conflict between irrational and rational outlooks, between subjective and objective interpretations, opens a gateway to deeper exploration.

Julius von Klever: “Erlkönig” (1911, oil on canvas) (goethezeitportal)

Oh, come, thou dear infant! oh come thou with me! The Erl-King’s shift from inchoate nature spirit to infernal tempter can be read as two thirds of a tripartite schema (triplets again). In this model, he transforms from a primitively perceived natural force to an anthropomorphized (and therefore more manageable) devil figure. Both are terrifying, but the former is a chaos while the latter has morality and a name. Part three culminates with the demonic pied piper revealed as death itself, in all its irremediable anti-glory. Thus the Erl-King passes through phases that mirror evolving human concepts of the awesome unknown – from prehistoric/animistic, to theistic/Abrahamic, to modern/existential.

A specifically Christian reading might find a dark inversion of the Trinity – wherein the Son suffers but is forsaken by the Father, and the Spirit is Unholy (picture a winged demon in place of the dove of peace and hellfire instead of Pentecost’s cleansing flames). In this grim theology death is triumphant: the stone of the tomb stays unmoved.

The theme is despairingly circular. If “Der Erlkönig” begins, in a sense, in primordial darkness, it finishes there as well, its nemesis revealed as the Grim Reaper in elfin/sylvan disguise. We find ourselves huddled once more around a fire with our primitive ancestors, trying to make sense of nature’s tumult and the end of consciousness.

The father now gallops, with terror half wild,
He grasps in his arms the poor shuddering child.

(Bowring)

Carl Gottlieb Peschel: “Der Erlkönig” (1838, fresco, detail) (Belvedere Schönhöhe; Wikipedia)

The father’s role is perplexing. At both literal and realist levels it makes sense: whatever troubles his son, surely the wisest course of action is to get the boy to safety at all costs. But his stubborn single-mindedness, his refusal to take his son’s fears seriously, might signify a destructive subtext. What is it the boy so fears that the father wishes to keep him from? Perhaps the Erl-King’s offer of sensual pleasures provides a clue. Does the father wish to keep his son a child – to prevent his transition to adulthood by “protecting” him from his emerging sexuality (still half conscious and therefore frightening to the boy) in a contrasexual riff on Rapunzel?

In this light, the boy’s death is recast as a triumph of sorts: his initiation into manhood despite his father’s meddling. But the end result is the same: he discovers that death is real, and that no person or deity can save him from it. As in Genesis there’s no turning back – once the forbidden fruit is sampled, the mortal knowledge it imparts bars us forever from Edenic childhood.

No metaphoric framework fully satisfies nor should it. Just as the Romantics intuitively grasped that classical rationalism left out approximately half of human experience, I’ve no wish to “solve” the song’s mystery. For me, the essence of “Der Erlkönig” will always be its final image, fixed and immutable:

He reaches his courtyard with toil and with dread –
The child in his arms finds he motionless, dead.

(Bowring)

Albert Edward Sterner: “Der Erlkönig” (c. 1910, lithograph) (Wikipedia)

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